r/emaildeliverability

Recently I spent some time recently looking at performance across different types of senders, from enterprise-level brands to small boutique setups.

We always warn high-volume senders about the risks of blasting and the need for strict throttling. But looking at the actual numbers, it’s the smaller senders who are getting absolutely hammered by the spam filters. I’ve been tracking patterns across thousands of accounts, and the gap is unreal.

low-volume senders are seeing average spam rates as high as 56%,

high-volume "power senders" are sitting much lower, around 18%

Essentially, the more you send, the better your inboxing seems to be.

It feels like we spend all our time talking about the danger of high volume, yet we’re ignoring a massive inconsistency crisis where small businesses and low-frequency senders are basically being treated as guilty until proven innocent by Gmail and Outlook.

My question is,

Do you think the filters are biased toward high-volume senders simply because they provide more data points for the algorithms to analyze?

How are you advising low-volume clients to stay out of the spam folder when they don't have the reputation weight of a major brand?

Any insights from your experience would be great. It can be from your brand or of your clients. Anything. Thanks.

Our outbound emails—just regular daily emails, not newsletters or promos—are getting silently dropped by some spam filters. They aren't ending up in spam folders either, just completely dropped. Our domain has been around for almost 10 years, and we have had no issues sending and receiving email until recently. We don't send out any newsletters or marketing emails. These are just daily business emails that are getting dropped.

We discovered that our domain didn't have SPF, DMARC, and DKIM set up. I have set that up, and verified that they are correct, but now over a week later, and emails still aren't being delivered reliably to certain recipients

I'm somewhat technically savvy, but not an expert in email deliverability. I had my coworkers try removing their email signatures, and reducing attachments to max 1 per email, and those emails did get delivered to the same folks that were not receiving them.

But even emails on a thread where someone else's signature is present causes our outgoing mail to get dropped. In the meantime, we've had to scrub each new email in the thread of any signatures or attachments

I checked our domain and IP against blacklists, and nothing came up. I also set up google Postmaster tools, but nothing is coming up.

I've had the affected coworkers try from different email clients, from the browser, from different IP addresses, etc. No change there.

At this point, I'm really not sure what else to try. I think we should hire an expert, but I don't even know where to look for such a thing.

Any help?

I'm a web designer. Generic cold emails get 2-5% reply rates. But when I spend 30 mins personalizing each pitch (actually researching their site, their reviews, their pain points), reply rate jumps to 40%.

Problem: I can't scale 30 mins per prospect. That's 25 hours for 50 emails.

Question for solopreneurs: How do you handle cold outreach at scale without burning out? Do you automate parts of it, or just accept the time investment?

Curious what actually works for people.

Been reading a lot about deliverability lately and one thing really stood out to me: most email problems don’t seem to start when emails hit spam ,they start way earlier with reputation and engagement signals slowly getting worse over time. What’s interesting is that a lot of people (me included for a while) focus almost entirely on setup:

• SPF/DKIM/DMARC
• spam scores
• blacklist checks
• avoiding spam words

But inbox providers seem to care way more about patterns:

• how consistently you send
• whether people engage with your emails
• sudden spikes in volume
• whether recipients ignore/delete messages over time

It honestly explains why some campaigns perform great at first and then slowly die even when nothing obvious changes. Feels like deliverability is turning into more of a long term trust game than a technical checklist.

We run an ecommerce email program and occasionally have flash sales where we need to send 3-4x our normal daily volume in a single blast. Every time we do this our deliverability tanks for days after. Anyone found a good way to handle volume spikes without wrecking your sender reputation?

We tried warming up the volume gradually the day before by sending a smaller campaign first. Helped a little but not enough. We also cleaned the list before every flash sale so were only hitting engaged contacts. Made the numbers look better on paper but the deliverability dip still happened.

Our ESP doesnt give us any control over sending speed per provider. It just blasts everything out as fast as it can. Starting to wonder if thats the actual problem but not sure what I can even do about it from my end.

We've been running our own sending infrastructure for a few years now. If I could go back and tell first-year me one thing it would be: get your SPF setup right on day one. Everything else you can fix later. This one gets exponentially harder.

Most ESPs start by having customers add CIDR ranges directly into their SPF records. Works fine at 10-20 customers. Then you scale and things start breaking in two ways.

The security gap

Your IP ranges grow, you add broader CIDR blocks. If a spammer has an IP in that same range, they can pass SPF checks on your customers domain. Not great.

The operational nightmare (this is the real killer)

SPF has a hard limit of 10 DNS lookups. Sounds like plenty. Its not.

Take a customer on xyz.com sending through Google Workspace, HubSpot, and your ESP. Thats three SPF includes. But:

→ spf.google.com alone resolves to spf1, spf2, spf3.google.com, each pointing to different CIDR ranges. Thats 4 lookups from one entry.

HubSpot adds more. By the time they add your record theyre at 9 or 10 lookups

Now you need to change your infra. Swap IPs, restructure CIDR ranges, whatever.

Every customer has to update their DNS. And if your change breaks their SPF record youre not just breaking email from your ESP. Youre breaking their Google Workspace. Their HubSpot campaigns. Everything. And they wont know why until their CEOs emails start bouncing.

Multiply that by hundreds of customers each with different DNS setups. Its months of coordination for what should be a routine infra change.

What we ended up doing was return path CNAME mapping. Customers point a CNAME to us, we manage SPF behind it. We can swap our entire infrastructure without a single customer touching their DNS.

Not a novel approach, plenty of mature senders do this. But the number of ESPs ive talked to who started with direct SPF and are now stuck is wild.